Helado de Coco Yucateco

This is from Yucatan. From Merida specifically, and from the small puertos along the Gulf coast, Progreso, Telchac, Chuburna, where coconut palms grow within sight of the water and the helado vendors push their carts down the malecon every Sunday afternoon. Helado de coco belongs to that geography. It is not the coconut ice cream of a national supermarket freezer. It is the helado you eat from a metal coupe at Sorbeteria Colon while the heat of the peninsula presses against the courtyard walls.

The dish has two coconuts in it because Yucatan has two coconuts available. The coco tierno gives you the water and the soft jellied pulp that melts into the base. The coco maduro gives you the firm white flesh that shreds and shaves. One without the other is incomplete. The canela is Mexican canela, the soft papery Ceylon bark that the women at the Lucas de Galvez market sell by the bundle. Cassia cinnamon from a supermarket jar is not the same spice and the helado will tell you so.

My mother did not make this. She was from Jalisco and Jalisco does not have this dish. But I have a page in my notebook from a senora named Dona Felicitas who sold helados from a cart in Progreso for forty years. She showed me how to crack the coco tierno with the back of a cleaver and where to scrape the pulp without losing it to the shell. Esto no es comida de un solo Mexico. Cada estado, su propia cocina.